New from Cambridge University Press!

Edited By Keith Allan and Kasia M. Jaszczolt

This book "fills the unquestionable need for a comprehensive and up-to-date handbook on the fast-developing field of pragmatics" and "includes contributions from many of the principal figures in a wide variety of fields of pragmatic research as well as some up-and-coming pragmatists."

Mairi L. McLaughlin, Department of French, University of California, Berkeley

SUMMARY

The Handbook of Translation Studies (Volume 1) is aimed at a relatively broadaudience of students, scholars, experts and professionals. Readers are likely tocome from both within translation studies and from other disciplines. Thehandbook consists of a two-page introduction followed by 74 short articles, eachtreating a different subfield in translation studies. Most of the entries arebetween four and eight pages long, with a few longer pieces reserved for whatare considered more substantial topics such as 'Descriptive translationstudies', 'Interpreting studies', 'Literary studies and translation studies',and 'The turns of translation studies'. The articles are written by specialistsin the different subfields, and were all subject to peer review. The volume endswith a subject index.

The Handbook of Translation Studies (Volume 1) is available in print copy and inan online edition (http://www.benjamins.com/online/hts/). The articles wereinitially the same in both versions, but the version online has the advantage ofoffering hyperlinks to the Translation Studies Bibliography(http://www.benjamins.com/online/tsb/). This is an annotated bibliography oftranslation and interpreting studies that is also published by John Benjaminsand has been available since 2004. The editors point out that contributors willbe asked to keep the online entries up to date.

EVALUATION

The Handbook of Translation Studies is definitely a useful volume for thoseinterested in acquiring some understanding of the vast field of research intranslation studies. It is organized in a relatively straightforward manneraround titles based on keywords (e.g. 'Adaptation', 'Corpora', 'Interpreting','Subtitling', 'Translation', 'Globalization and translation', 'Journalism andtranslation' and 'Terminology and translation'). This is an intentional strategyto facilitate readers' use of the handbook alongside the Translation StudiesBibliography, also organized around keywords. It does, however, make for aslightly unusual contents page and one or two rather peculiar titles such as'Web and translation.' Nevertheless, this organization definitely makes thehandbook particularly accessible to readers from outside the discipline.

The entries are written by specialists in the various subfields so translationscholars will not be surprised to find Michael Cronin writing about'Globalization and translation,' Jeremy Munday writing about 'TranslationStudies' as a discipline and Sara Laviosa writing about 'Corpora.' Some of theother names are definitely less familiar but the spread of regions andinstitutions that are represented certainly coincides with centers of activityin the discipline today (e.g. Finland, northern Europe, Spain and Vienna). Theentries all attempt to offer an overview of the given subfield. This generallyinvolves an historical account of its evolution. The reader will notice obviousparallels between the different subfields: the relative youth of the disciplineof translation studies means that most of the key developments have taken placein the last two or three decades. A few interesting exceptions to this includean early research article on interpreting written by Sanz in 1930 (see the entryon 'Interpreting Studies' by Franz Pöchhacker). In a few articles, the focusseems to shift entirely away from translation studies to the practice oftranslation itself. For example, in Jorge Díaz Cintas' entry on 'Subtitling,'the reader learns a great deal about subtitling but there is very little aboutthe work that has been done on this practice within translation studies. Onceagain, this might be related to the relative youth of the field but it is afeature of this book that renders it more suitable for those entering thediscipline than for established scholars.

As one would expect in a publication such as this, frequent reference is made tokey publications and each entry is followed by a short list of references. Thisis the feature of the entries that is probably the most useful for scholars,particularly those starting out research in an area that is new to them.Scholars new to the field -- or subfields -- will also be introduced to theterminology of the discipline. The entry on 'Corpora,' for example, offers avery clear outline of the different types of corpora that can be compiled (e.g.sample or monitor; synchronic or diachronic; general or specialized;monolingual, bilingual or multilingual; written, spoken, mixed or multimodal;annotated or non-annotated). This entry is particularly clear and logical indescribing corpora, the tools of analysis and the field of corpus-basedtranslation studies. The final section of the article on 'Looking to the future'suggests a certain amount of excitement about the future of this subfield thathas come to dominate translation studies in the first decade of the twentiethcentury. What is absent from this article -- and indeed from many others -- is agood sense of the principal findings of the subfield. This is not whollysurprising: this is a field in its early days, many findings remain contentiousand it is not the purpose of a handbook to become embroiled in these debates.Nevertheless, the book as a whole might have benefited from more mention ofparticular findings and results so as to avoid the occasional vague passage.

Given the large number of contributors, it is not surprising that there is acertain level of stylistic variation among the articles. The entry on 'Literarystudies and translation studies' (perhaps aptly) stands out for its livelyengaging tone. The entry on 'Semiotics and translation' achieves a much welcomedclarity despite the relative complexity of some of the notions treated. In a fewcases, a little more editing would have made for a smoother style; the entry on'Drama translation,' for example, contains some awkward collocations, such as'reveal of' instead of 'reveal about,' and the occasional obscure phrase such as'The expected life span of such is long.' The translation-studies readership islikely to be as forgiving as possible when it comes to such errors, but slightlymore rigorous copy-editing would have been beneficial. It is to the editors' andpublishers' credit, however, that this variety of styles does not lead to anuncomfortable choppiness. A feeling of unity is created by the constancy ofaims, and formal features such as article-length, number of references and themise en page.

As the editors themselves admit, this Handbook of Translation Studies is ''notthe first of its kind'' (Gambier and Doorslaer 2010: 1). Indeed, a number ofencyclopedias and handbooks have been published in recent years. The most usefulof these for researchers in translation studies is without doubt the four-volumeTranslation Studies: Critical Concepts in Linguistics edited by Mona Baker(2009). Baker also edited the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies(2008). Also a one-volume reference work, this is arguably the closestcompetition to Gambier and Doorslaer's handbook. It is also worth mentioningKuhiwczak and Littau's (2007) Companion to Translation Studies. Although it isconsiderably shorter than any of the other works mentioned here -- it containsjust 9 articles -- it considers in greater detail some of the same subfieldscovered by the Handbook of Translation Studies. The shorter companion alsohighlights the relatively narrow perspective adopted in some of the entries inthe handbook; where the Handbook of Translation Studies has a six-page articleon drama translation (by Sirkku Aaltonen), the Companion to Translation Studieshas a fourteen-page article that addresses both theater and opera translation(by Mary Snell-Hornby). It is somewhat surprising that opera translation is notmentioned in the handbook.

Although it is not the only one of its kind, the Handbook of Translation Studies(Volume 1) will indeed be useful to the broad audience of students, scholars andprofessionals targeted by the publisher. It will serve some as an entry intotranslation studies as a discipline, whereas for others, it will be the firstpoint of contact with a range of different subfields. It is less likely to beuseful as a reference work once scholars have begun working in a particularsubfield. It is unclear how regularly contributors will update their entries inthe online version of the handbook, but if they do so with some frequency, thenthe existence of the online version could represent the greatest advantage ofthis handbook over all others.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Mairi L. McLaughlin is an Assistant Professor of French at the University
of California, Berkeley. She specializes in French and Romance linguistics
as well as translation studies. Most of her work in both linguistics and
translation studies centers on syntax, and she is particularly interested
in the language of the press. She is the author of the book 'Syntactic
Borrowing in Contemporary French: A Linguistic Analysis of News
Translation' (Oxford: Legenda, 2011).